Is there a performance penalty lowering the sdk version

Question

I have a published android app where the minSdk version is set to 8. Since then I have realized that there really is nothing preventing me from lowering this requirement down to 3.

Is there a perfomance hit or anything else that should prevent me from doing this?

Answer 1

I don't think there's a performance issue, lowering the minimum version will only means that devices running those versions will be able to run your app.

I wouldn't worry too much about reducing it from 8 to 3, though, because 8 is Android 2.2 and above, and that already covers 95% of the market as of today.

You can see a breakdown of the versions being used here: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html